Transcript of Oral History Interview with Mary Vogel

Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project Copyright Notice: © 2019 Minnesota Historical Society Researchers are liable for any infringement. For more information, visit www.mnhs.org/copyright. Version 3 August 20, 2018 Mary Vogel Narrator Kim Heikkila Interviewer April 12, 2018 Minneapolis, MN Mary Vogel -MV Kim Heikkila -KH KH: This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Minnesota in the Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. It is Thursday, April 12, 2018, and I’m here with Mary Vogel in her office at the University of Minnesota [University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN]. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to Mary about her role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and more specifically her work in the presidential campaign for Senator Eugene McCarthy [Eugene Joseph McCarthy (1916-2005)]. So thank you, Mary, for being willing to talk about these years and experiences with us. So I would like to start, even though I just said it, by asking you to state and spell your name and then maybe indicate the name that you were known by during that time. MV: My name is Mary Vogel. Vogel is spelled V-o-g-e-l. In 1967 and 1968, I was Mary Heffernan, H-e-f-f-e-r-n-a-n. KH: And when and where were you born? MV: I was born in Red Wing [Red Wing, MN] in 1940. KH: Okay, and how do you identify yourself racially and/or ethnically. MV: I’m white and I have a German and British Isles ancestry, with a little bit of Scandinavian. KH: And I indicated a bit of this in my introduction but if you could just identify your primary role in the antiwar movement and the McCarthy campaign. MV: I was a member of the peace movement slash antiwar movement in the sixties and in 1967, I was asked to be the only paid staff person for the McCarthy for President campaign in Minnesota. KH: Okay, and what are you doing now? 8 MV: Now, I’m part-time. I’m at the University of Minnesota. For decades I ran a research and outreach center called Center for Changing Landscapes [Center for Changing Landscapes, 115 Green Hall, University of Minnesota, 1530 Cleveland Avenue North, St. Paul, MN], worked with communities about creating sustainable futures for them and now I’m associated with the Minnesota Design Center [Minnesota Design Center, 89 Church Street S.E., 1 Rapson Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN] and doing the same thing also. KH: All right, great. We were talking a little bit before the recording started so I will revisit some of what we said already. I know you have about an hour, or a little bit less at this point, so we’ll just keep an eye on the clock and make sure you’re out by— MV: If it goes longer it will be okay. I can call. We’ll have to stop. KH: Okay, all right. Okay, if you can start then by just telling me a little bit about your family background. Was your family politically active when you were a child? MV: My father was a lawyer and my mother was an art teacher and a community activist. Mother and Dad really were people who really transformed the community that they were in, working with others. And Mother used art as a vehicle for community work. If the highway department was coming through and destroying some historic buildings, she had classes paint them and then create more awareness of the value of historic structures in Red Wing. My father was very, very interested in the Mississippi River. The harbor is named after him now; [he was] very active in that sphere. He also represented a lot of Indians from Prairie Island [Prairie Island Indian Community, Goodhue County, MN] as a lawyer. My mother used her visualization techniques to diagram and illustrate community processes so people could understand the planning commission’s process. She was on the planning commission for a number of years. She also was a catalyst for starting many things like the Red Wing Art Association, the Environmental Learning Center and she did that in partnership with very robust civic partners in Red Wing. But she was the creative sparkplug. She was a catalyst for many things. KH: Interesting. And did you have siblings? MV: I have three brothers. KH: Older? Younger? MV: One older; two younger. KH: So you’re second of four? MV: Right. KH: Okay. What kinds of values were important to your family when you were growing up? 9 MV: I think a sense of community was very important. My mother came to Red Wing during the Depression to establish the art department in the high school and one of the values that she had was that it was very important that everybody went to the same school, high school. So you had people on welfare or Indians and we didn’t have a lot of racial disparity; we just had, you know, Indians, but people of considerable means, all together. And she thought that that was very important and my father was very respectful of everybody. And both of them were valued members of the community and they valued being in the community. KH: And did they adhere to or follow any particular political party? MV: Both of them were originally Republicans. My mother morphed into a Democrat later and my father originally was a Democrat who, when FDR [US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Sr. (1882-1945)] tried to pack the Supreme Court, he switched parties. As a lawyer he was offended. KH: Okay, that makes some sense I guess. And what about religion? Was religion important to your family? MV: We were Catholics. My mother converted to Catholicism. She grew up in a not as strongly identified Protestant as—she would go to the church that she liked the music in. She was a person who—she converted to Catholicism because she thought it was important that a family be together and that Catholicism was quite important to my father, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve. KH: Was there a tradition of military service in your family? MV: My father was too young to be in World War I and too old to be—World War I, I’m sorry—and too old to be in World War II, but he served in the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard Auxiliary. KH: Did you have uncles or cousins or any other—? MV: My uncle served in the navy in the Pacific during World War II. KH: Okay. And was—whether it was your father’s service in the Coast Guard Auxiliary or your uncle’s in World War II—was there a family awareness of that kind of service? Was it a proud tradition or was it—? MV: Well, this was what you do. I mean, my uncle—I only had one uncle because my father was an only child and my mother had one brother and my uncle was very active in Minneapolis in all kinds of things; both of them were dynamos and transformed the communities that they lived in. So serving in the military was not a crowning achievement. I mean, when my uncle died, they did have the navy insignia among all the other kinds of things that he did. It wasn’t central to their identity or to the culture in our family. KH: Okay. What high school did you go to? 10 MV: I went to Red Wing High School. KH: And what year did you graduate? MV: Nineteen fifty-eight. KH: So when you were growing up and were in high school, were you aware of the civil rights movement that was kind of bubbling to the surface and getting some national attention by that time? MV: Not very much, but I was—if you were to describe me and what has been my life work, I can say that I have been a catalyst for many things. So, for example, when I was eleven, [bell rings] I thought the Cannon River was a good river for canoeing in and so I asked the editor of the local paper, and my younger brother went with me, and we took him out on a canoe trip on the Cannon River and then he wrote a piece about it. And that was the start of the Cannon River as [recreational asset that was perceived as such by the community]. When I was fifteen, we didn’t have anything to do in the summertime as adolescents, but we had this wonderful auditorium, the Sheldon Memorial Auditorium [now Sheldon Theatre, 443 West Third Street, Red Wing, MN], which was used as a movie theater. And so I thought it would be fun if we could put on a play in the summertime so the first time I ever baked a cake or cooked anything really—I was fifteen; it was a yellow cake—I invited five men, leaders of the community [bell rings] to my house for coffee and cake and pitched them the idea of starting a theater company for the kids in the summertime. And like the person who owned the shoe factory; and the person who owned the tannery; and a couple others—all men—my father was included. And everybody wrote out a check for a hundred dollars and we had five hundred dollars and we started a theater. KH: When you were fifteen? MV: When I was fifteen.

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